DUPL!C!TY:

Duplicity is a condition wherein the person you believe yourself to know and the person that that person is diverge. Unlike a delusion, this divergence is through no fault of your own; you err innocently and naively in a manner that can only have been orchestrated by the other, since you have held the other to a standard of integrity which only you possess. At the very moment that your friendship appears most stable, precious, and sincere, already the other has begun to move against you, without remorse. Clinging to the other’s word, ascribing integrity to it and honouring it, you are left to worry about what had happened to your friend, driven to more and more elaborate displays of loyalty or affection in the attempt to restore the correspondence. Once you are informed of an alternate history, almost invariably by a third party, your deepest fears will find corroboration. Yet these fears, having been irrational, could never have been enough to deter you. Had you considered the behaviour and intention of the other person, in the manner that the third party describes it, at the moment that it had happened, you would have been considered crazy, since it would have stood in such blaring opposition to everything that your ostensibly good friend had led you to believe. How is it, then, that women so often get away with this disappearing act? Why would men, who have yet to hear a reason for the split, one which could only have happened without reason and without even announcement, accept the moral burden for the tragedy? This much is certain: that the duplicitous woman is a narcissist. She accuses the man of caring for her TOO much, and men who have a defect in caring favour her. Yet what do we say when we accuse others of loving us excessively? We imply that while we expect others to admire us, so much so that we presume upon the admiration, we take the admiration for granted, for we have enough admiration to satisfy our pride. By so doing, a narcissist turns a relationship that might actually benefit her in many ways into one that only benefits her ego. By her own definition, it is unhealthy, though secretly it is only because she has been wasteful of the relationship she has cultivated. Most salient therefore is this lie: that there never WAS a relationship. Supposing that I say that I wish to maintain a friendship, I am left to grapple with the possibility that “space”, by its very nature ambiguous, meant nothing more than the sudden betrayal of a friendship, and that this sudden betrayal placed upon me the moral burden of its unconditional acceptance, even without notification, irrespective of my moral performance as a friend. It is because friendship itself is not considered a relationship, as though the latter category were some sort of a higher social stratum, that the feelings of warmth I feel for the illusion are marginalized by the illusionist.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]